by Elder Bill Wylie-Kellerman, photos courtesy of Kirkridge Retreat Center
Elders Donna Jones, Janet Wolf, and I joined 175 other people from around the country, (and there were 60 folks yearning on a waitlist), in a Festival of Radical Discipleship hosted by Kirkridge Retreat Center in Bangor PA over Memorial Day weekend. Elders of the Lenape nation, the rocks of the Kittatinny Ridge, and the creatures of forest and earth welcomed our gathering.
Planning had begun long before the Proliferation of masked ICE men disappearing people in unmarked cars, before this assault on the constitution and the rule of law, before the latest gutting of regulation and environmental protections, before the chain-sawing of SafetyNet institutions and support for the impoverished and unhoused, before the algorithmic consolidation of personal data toward a surveillance state, before all this and more ongoing. Nevertheless, the relationships formed and the community practices shared, the art, music, ritual, prayer, and prophetic preaching woven through it all, were right on time for our souls in this moment.
Bible studies, workshops, and plenaries were organized into three tracks: 1) Sabbath economics/alternatives to capitalism; 2) Decolonizing and dismantling White Supremacy; and 3) Watershed discipleship/environmental justice. Panels addressed the Palestinian genocide, the renewed attacks on BIPOC and queer folk, and the land-back voices of Indigenous peoples.
The Festival, now planned as an annual event at Kirkridge, draws on the legacy of Word and World: A People’s School which began 25 years ago in Greensboro, NC under the leadership of Joyce and Nelson Johnson along with Elder Vincent Harding. At Vincent’s urging, Word and World was rooted there in movement history – remembering at that initial institute, the first sit-in (1960), the A&T student uprising (1969), the Greensboro Massacre (1979), and a community-based K-Mart warehouse organizing struggle. With respect to the massacre, Nelson (an Elder who passed just months ago) was himself wounded, and the first Community Truth and Reconciliation Commission on U.S. soil was held. An auspicious root to be sure.
Subsequent Word and World institutes continued to use popular education to link “the seminary, the sanctuary, the streets, and the soil,” focusing sequentially on the Indigenous and base-community movement of liberation theology (in Tucson); the emerging justice struggles of womanchurch and queer folk (Rochester, NY); and the North American resistance tradition embodied in the catholic left (Philadelphia). For a decade or more, Word and World flourished, also offering internship and mentoring programs. Two additional schools on faith and labor in the south, one drawing in Bishop William Barber, may be considered as feeding what became the new Poor Peoples’ Campaign. Each school would focus on one of the five streams of liberation, while simultaneously braiding in the others
Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries carried the legacy forward, now for a remarkable eighteen years, with some 28 events, essentially localizing the model in California’s Ventura Watershed. All in all, rich legacy.
The now annual Festival of Radical Discipleship at Kirkridge takes up that history in a moment more dire and dreadful. One which will need its hope all the more dearly.
Bill Wylie-Kellermann, is an American Methodist pastor, nonviolent community activist, and author.